Fear has a lot to do with discipline. Fear is not merely a matter of weakness and submission. Heroism does not begin with the end of fear. A fearless person is insensitive and cannot be a hero. Fear is neither negative nor positive. Like good cannot be attached with value judgment only (Socrates said something like this in Plato’s dialogue Charmanides), bad has its own value. My argument is not to simplify good and bad and likewise not to simplify fear.
Let me talk a bit more about fear. Unwarranted fear is something like while riding on a highway bus and being fearful by “imagining” a bus accident which you have read in a newspaper last week. Your fear is based on the news of the accident. Your fear is “real” if you see the driver drinking a lot in a highway pub. Fear is not synonymous to anxiety, worry, and dread though it is semantically close to dread and uneasiness. My point is to relate the word fear with “I am afraid of . . .” because I am unqualified to discourse about the nuances of the term fear.
The “afraid of” thing is what I am talking about in the context of coming late. This lack of fear is the problem with all of us, the deterrent, the mother factor. The people who did not reward SP Kharel do not have the healthy sense of fear. Those who gulp millions of rupees from government funds do not have fear of anything. The famous politicians who drag the nation with their delaying games do not fear anyone. The drivers who do not care rules do not fear anyone.
I have not heard a single sensible Nepali who has not praised SP Kharel for his dedication and honesty to his job. People like him are the unsung heroes of modern Nepal--very few these days--who certainly roam here and there in the nooks and corners of Nepali lives. He went on a leave and no one in the Ministry of Home is fearful of their act. A simple fear of the common and sensible Nepalis could have prompted the officials to reward him for his acts if not by their sensible judicial faculty.
My brother who was very much like Huck Finn in his childhood, one day, brought a dead frog to my mom. What it is, she asked. For you to cook, your dishes are delicious mom! He had come late from the school and wanted to please mother by his act of reward to her skills. I read this act of love in relation to fear in a very compassionate sense. My brother had some sense of fear while finding a dead frog to give it to mother to cook. It must have been an act of mixed emotions and feelings but you do read the sweet fear of the mother in the episode of the frog.
The “afraid of” thing is what I am talking about in the context of coming late. This lack of fear is the problem with all of us, the deterrent, the mother factor.
I would love to meet the mothers of these roaring politicians of the leading parties. Fear factor goes along with motherhood and how the mother in this sense of the term disappears from the mind of the politicians and administrators. Just a couple of days ago, a physician took chewing gum after smoking a cigarette: Mom will spank me. You mean literally, asked the other. Yes, she hits on my buttocks and hard the hands come. My buttocks start getting eerie sensations when I come home late.
The buttocks of fear are connected with my childhood. It still sends chill down my back when I come late. My success story cannot ignore the hands that used to come down hard on by buttocks after the dusk. Those loving hands spanking my buttocks sent fear down my evening-being. I would change dress, eat dinner with parents, and study hard. I miss those days and that is why I sometimes go late to be hit hard not by her hands anymore though but by her looks. The aiming hands discipline you. This is what the physician told me.
I was talking about Ramesh Kharel and the administrators who did not reward him. Their mothers must have spanked them to jolt their moral beings. But what went wrong with them when they grew up? They forgot those stern eyes and hard hands of their mothers. They are the metaphors of sensibilities which shape your morals starting from the buttocks not from the heart and mind, so to say. Don’t you think that disciplining has strange places to begin with?
orungupto@gmail.com
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